The Met Office: Delivering a smart cloud-based weather community

The Met Office is the UK’s national weather service and has provided weather forecasts for over 150 years. The Met Office records weather observations from a network of over 280 observing stations across the UK. To supplement this, it wanted to view data collected by weather enthusiasts from areas not covered by its network.

Since launch, Weather Observations Website (WOW) has built up over 100 million weather observations from over 150 countries.

By using a cloud-based solution, PA helped the Met Office keep IT infrastructure investment to an absolute minimum. It also ensured a scalable solution that would automatically provision additional capacity during significant weather events and other high-demand periods, preventing the need for additional servers that would otherwise be under-utilised much of the time. In just five weeks from launch, WOW built up two million weather readings across the UK, North America, Europe and the Middle East.